Day 1: Le Matin

Here are some pictures from touristy yesterday! Anyway, today was the day I was supposed to stop being just a tourist, and actually start to work. I woke up very early(that's when I wrote my last post), and had been packed and ready to go for hours when Muriel, the head researcher, was supposed to come to the hotel we (Christabel and I) were staying at and help us move into our permanent apartment. I met her in the parking lot: we both approached each other awkwardly, unsure if we were approaching the right person. I decided to go out on a limb and introduce myself, deciding the worst that could happen was that I introduced myself to a random person. It was a needless worry. Muriel, or Dr. Boucart, was not at all the way I imagined her but I immediately liked her very much: she had a homey and down to earth way about her, and after seeing her go to her office in her hiking shoes and some baggy trousers, I was not at all surprised to learn she hates cities and lived in "la campagne" with 2 dogs 20km from Lille, and that she disliked wine and cheese. She was refreshingly direct and honest and every bit the scientist. When we arrived at the apartment after hauling our luggage around the streets we had a lot of paperwork to fill out. The manager of the apartments is a bit comical with his well ordered, neat look at odds with his spacey and stressed out behavior, but he is very nice and helpful. The one thing that annoys me about the apartment is that the elevators hate me. They have weird buttons that don't respond to my fingers. I'm not kidding: when I first told the manager I couldn't use the elevator, he laughed, but when I showed him, he became puzzled. He then tried to take my finger with his hand and press the button, but it didn't work. Then he pressed the button on his own and it worked fine. The same thing happened when I was Christabel: it worked for her but not for me. The theory I've been given is that my fingers are to small, so now I just take the stairs to the fourth floor everyday. In any case, after being given a tour of the apartment and changing rooms after my first room has no internet, I settled into my studio room on the fourth floor. I just dropped off my bags and Christabel, Muriel, and I went to the laboratory to get a tour and learn about our job. We spent over an hour meeting everyone in the laboratory and then it was time for a terrific lunch at the Roger Salengro hospital with some of the researchers. Afterwards, Christabel and I stayed to do some background reading on vision and opthamology and then I went to a really cool optional talk given by a Belgian researcher on psychzophrenia and EEG (Electroencephalogram) use. It was all in French, so I sometimes had trouble understand the details (my limited neuroscience background didn't help either), but I was able to get the general ideas, the most interesting of which was that new techniques now allowed researchers to combine MRI and PET techniques to get temporal and spatial data at the same time, something that had been long considered impossible. After leaving the laboratory with 5 scientific articles to read that night, I came home to finish unpacking before my adventures for the evening began. :-)